The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit on Thursday granted the government’s emergency motion to pause the preliminary injunction in Red Eagle Law, L.C. v. Rubio, No. 26-6943, suspending an order that had required the State Department to announce and open the fiscal year 2027 Diversity Visa registration. The page that order names, travel.state.gov’s visas news list, still showed “Countries Subject to Visa Bonds,” published October 2, 2026, as its newest item when it was read shortly after 12:20 p.m. Pacific today, at the top of a 155-item list. The registration window that the injunction required to open by midnight Eastern on November 1 will not open.
The stay order, filed October 29 and designated for publication, is per curiam from Judges M. Margaret McKeown, N. Randy Smith and Holly A. Thomas. It holds that the government “has made a strong showing that it is likely to succeed on the merits,” because the plaintiff, Red Eagle Law, a San Diego immigration law firm, is not “arguably within the zone of interests” of the Diversity Visa statute, 8 U.S.C. § 1153(c), and so lacks a cause of action. The statute, the court said, never contemplated law firms the way the asylum statute in East Bay Sanctuary Covenant v. Trump contemplated free legal services. It added: “We do not endorse the Department’s failure to open the lottery registration period.”
Judge N. Randy Smith, concurring, wrote that Red Eagle also lacks Article III standing. Its claimed injury — future clients who would hire it — rests on a chain of speculation: that someone registers, is among roughly 100,000 selectees, applies, appears before a consular officer who finds them eligible, and then picks that firm over proceeding alone. Revenue of that kind, he wrote, is not a concrete injury.
The injunction the stay suspends was the amended order Judge Jinsook Ohta signed on October 21 in the Southern District of California (No. 3:26-cv-04738-JO-VET, docket entry 31). It required the department to publish the registration period on that page by midnight Eastern on October 29 — opening and closing dates, entry website, requirements — and to repeat it through customary channels, including the Federal Register; to open registration by midnight Eastern on November 1 for thirty days; and to notify selectees by December 3. The department could ask to move only that last date, and only by filing a request by October 30 — today, a date the stay has overtaken.
The appeal continues: the circuit’s October 20 case-opening notice set the opening brief for November 17 and the answering brief for December 15, and an October 29 docket entry opens a 14-day window for a motion to reconsider. None of this touches employment-based cutoffs; the November Visa Bulletin stands, and EB-2, EB-1A and H-1B filings keep their own dates. What DV-2027 has now is no registration window and no announcement, and the only official page that would carry either is the one that still ends at October 2.
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